Israeli Court Orders Changes to Barrier in West Bank

By JOSEPH BERGER

The New York Times

June 30, 2004

JERUSALEM, June 30 Israel's
Supreme Court ruled today that the barrier the Army is building to wall off
residents from terror attacks must take into account the needs of Palestinian
farmers in the West Bank, and the Army said it would comply with the ruling by
changing the route of the structure.

The decision by the three-judge
court recognized that Israel had a legitimate security rationale for building a
fence or wall and could expropriate plots of land in the West Bank.

But it added the Army high command had a legal duty to balance security
considerations with humanitarian ones. The barrier's current path, the court
ruled, requires seizing tens of thousands of acres of land and would generally
burden the entire way of life in the villages of the petitioners.

In a
statement, Israel's Ministry of Defense said it would abide by the ruling and
re-draw the proposed route of the barrier to comply with the principles set by
the Supreme Court.

Some farm land will still be taken, but the
petitioners believe it will be a lot less than the original route, which was
designed to create enough distance to stop potential gunfire from the village or
the approach of a suicide bomber.

The court ruled that the barrier,
intended to protect residents from terror attacks, must take into account the
needs of Palestinians like the farmers in the hilltop village of Beit Surik, who
would have lost much of the terraced land on which they grow olives, grapes and
figs.

The decision sets a precedent for how Israel can go about
completing its fence, which is one-quarter built and, when complete, would run
for 437 miles from the northern West Bank, wrap around some settlements like
Ariel quite deep in the West Bank and stretch down to the southern rim of the
West Bank.

In most areas, the barrier consists of an electronic fence
with coils of razor wire, adjoining trenches and guard towers, but some sections
include 20-foot-high concrete walls.

The decision set off measured
satisfaction in the scrappy village of Beit Surik, and in the adjoining Israel
town of Mevasseret Zion, whose Israeli residents had joined the Palestinians in
arguing that a fence rising between them would increase animosity and thereby
lessen the sense of safety.

Just last week, children from the two
towns joined together to fly kites as sign of the cooperative economic
relationship between them that would be damaged by the construction of too
invasive a fence.

"We looked at the wall as a catastrophe for our
village because we have high unemployment and if some people get income it was
the result of farming," said the mayor, Mohammed Kandil, in an interview in his
office in Beit Surik.

He said that the village before 1948 originally
had 52,000 acres of land that was cut in half by wars and occupation. The fence
would have separated the farmers from all but 4,000 acres of land, requiring
them to go through gates or checkpoints to tend their fields and orchards.

"They want to confiscate and steal the land," the mayor said. "Security is
a pretext."

Israel says that the barrier is strictly a security measure,
intended to prevent Palestinian suicide bombings and other attacks, and that it
could be moved or torn down at a later date. Palestinians denounce it as a land
confiscation that would greatly disrupt the lives of many Palestinians and
complicate efforts to establish a Palestinian state.

The Bush
administration has said that it does not object to the barrier in principle, but
believes that it should be on, or very close to, the borders Israel had before
the 1967 war in which Israel captured the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.